As discussed in a prior post, Session Law 2015-277 requires North Carolina local governments [more…]

The Community and Economic Development program at the School of Government provides public officials with training, research, and assistance that support local efforts to create jobs and wealth, expand the tax base, and maintain vibrant communities. We deploy the resources of the University to support the development goals of communities in North Carolina.

As of now, the fires that burned in Northern California’s wine region earlier this month are nearly 100% contained. It has been a dramatic, devastating scene in perhaps the most iconic region for grape-growing and wine-drinking outside of Tuscany or Bordeaux, and the impacts are, and will continue to be, far-reaching. In the wake of the fires lie flattened businesses, torched earth, and the shaken but resurging livelihoods of hundreds of wine growers and vineyard owners. Read more »

In its latest venture to connect low income communities to private capital, LIIF, in partnership with JPMorgan Chase & Co., created Equity with a Twist (EQT) in February 2016. EQT is a social capital product that provides flexible, low-cost financing to support and incentivize solutions to poverty in low income neighborhoods. It is advertised as providing high social return and modest financial return to its investors, and projects are geared towards mixed-income housing to provide families with affordable homes, K-12 education, and early childhood education. Read more »

The following are articles and reports on the web that the Community and Economic Development Program at the UNC School of Government shared through social media over the past month. Follow us on twitter or facebook to receive regular updates.

Items of interest related to CED in North Carolina:

Charlotte, like other North Carolina cities, is using city-owned property to develop affordable housing: http://bit.ly/2hMAOja

WRAL’s analysis of One North Carolina Fund and JDIG business recruitment economic development incentives. http://bit.ly/2yzA05i

Other CED items:

New working paper provides a comprehensive review of inclusionary housing programs and policies – 1,379 total – across the US aimed at creating more affordable housing: http://bit.ly/2hLoLTa

Do larger cities adapt better than small metros to economic disruption from automation and trade? http://nyti.ms/2g0Zct8

At the corner of Union and Green in Morganton’s historic downtown sits the Marquee Cinemas Mimosa 7 multiplex movie theater. You would be hard-pressed to find a 7-screen first-run downtown movie theater in this day and age in a North Carolina town with a population of about 16,000. You would also be hard-pressed to find a location more distinctly “Downtown Morganton” than the Mimosa. A historic theater combined with new construction, the Mimosa is right around the corner from the Historic Burke County Courthouse, down the street from the Burke County Register of Deeds and a stone’s throw away from The Morganton Main Street Department, a community and economic development organization that was instrumental to the theater’s survival.

Movie theaters are some of the most unique and iconic historic buildings in city downtowns. North Carolina is home to many such historic movie theaters, and the CED has featured some of these examples and the challenges inherent in redeveloping and reusing historic theaters in past posts (Don Gibson Theater, Redeveloping Historic Downtown Theaters, The Challenges of Movie Theater Redevelopment). The Mimosa Theater in Morganton was no exception with respect to design and history – featuring a vintage Art Deco exterior and interior seating capacity for 600, it initially began operating as a movie theater in the 1940s, with Carmike Cinemas serving as its final operator prior to closing its doors in the late-90s. Read more »

It seems like almost everyone, including regulators and utility organizations, recognize the benefits and need for expanded partnerships and collaboration in the water and wastewater sector. Small towns are finding it difficult to meet their growing infrastructure and regulatory needs and are talking with each other and their larger neighbors about different regional service models. Partnerships are not limited to small systems; the cost of new water and wastewater supply is so great, that even large, financially healthy systems are increasingly working together to share costs and partner on large facilities. Most of these partnerships involve two or more utilities working together, but in at least one North Carolina county, one of the key partners in many of the region’s recent water partnerships is a local government (Catawba County) that is not a direct utility service provider. For more than 20 years, Catawba County has assisted many of the municipalities in the County install Read more »

Asheville, North Carolina – “New Age Mecca,” “San Francisco of the East,” “Land of the Sky,” “New Freak Capital,” and “America’s Happiest City.” These are just some of the nicknames that Asheville enjoys, due to its more recent prominence in the social, economic, and political domains of North Carolina and larger southeast region. It is difficult to ignore this meteoric rise to fame, particularly for those who enjoy majestic mountain views, craft beer, vegetarian eats, and homegrown arts and crafts. But just what factors explain this downtown renaissance and revitalization Asheville is current experiencing? Who shapes downtown Asheville, and what can we learn about urban governance and downtown revitalization from their success? This blog post will explore the former question, and a subsequent blog post will examine the latter.

Elizabeth Strom and Robert Kerstein explore Asheville’s revitalization in the 2017 edition of Urban Affairs Review. In their article, titled “The Homegrown Downtown: Redevelopment in Asheville, North Carolina,” Strom and Kerstein attempt to pinpoint just what exactly went right in the “successful transformation of Asheville’s downtown from desolate to vibrant.” With emphasis placed on the post-1980 period, this article illustrates how successful redevelopment coalitions have shaped the downtown, and how these “social-entrepreneurial” coalitions could be replicated in downtowns similarly rooted in an architecturally-significant historic built environment and an economy reliant on independent business. Strom and Kerstein argue that Asheville’s “social-entrepreneurial” activity in the business, creative, and philanthropic sectors offers insights into the larger concepts of downtown revitalization, urban governance, and city development policy. Read more »

The photo was eerily familiar to anyone interested in CED. The headline from the New York Times article on September 20, just days before the German national election, read, “Merkel Says Germans ‘Never Had It Better.’ But Many Feel Left Behind.” The accompanying photo by Gordon Welters, shown here, features Read more »

The days of public buses pulling away from a bus stop with the loud growl of a diesel engine and a cloud of black smoke could become a thing of the past. The company Proterra makes fully electric buses, and North Carolina will soon see four of these buses hit their streets. The governing board for Raleigh Durham International Airport has agreed to purchase four of Proterra’s Catalyst E2 fully-electric buses, four charging stations, and the required infrastructure and training at a cost of $3.4 million. The cost was offset by a $1.6 million grant from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). Read more »

I recently was asked to speak to a joint meeting of town councils of four communities in Eastern North Carolina. The subject they asked me to speak about was community engagement. What I ended up spending most of my time talking about were two frames for thinking about the role of local government in the overall process of community building. The two frames are local government as vending machine and local government as barn raising. In 1996, Frank Benest, former city manager of Palo Alto, California, wrote an article in ICMA’s Public Management (PM) magazine asking whether local government was serving customers or engaging citizens. He used the metaphor of the vending machine (which he attributed to another city manager, Rick Cole) to describe the common way local government’s are thought of.

A perpetual interest in the field of economic development is identifying “best practices” and benchmarking the “state-of-the art” with respect to promising tools, strategies, and programs. One source for this type of information is the Excellence in Economic Development Awardscompetition administered by the International Economic Development Council (IEDC) over the past several years. The IEDC awards competition recognizes success, innovation, creativity, quality, and community impact in the work of economic development organizations.

Organizations submit entries to be considered for awards in various categories including promotional materials, internet and new media, programs, and partnerships. Judges apply specific criteria in reviewing the submissions to select gold, silver, and bronze level winners for each category based on the size of the population served.

IEDC announced the 2017 award recipients in September at its Annual Conference in Toronto. Two North Carolina organizations were recognized this year. Electricities of North Carolina, Inc. is the silver winner in the General Purpose Print Promotion category (population greater than 500,000) for its NC Public Power Calendar. The calendar uses journalistic photos and short stories to highlight distinctive businesses, destinations, and community leaders in the Electricities service area. The Town of Fuquay-Varina is the silver winner in the Video/Multimedia Promotion category (population 25,000-200,000) for its State of the Town Address video, which communicates the town’s economic development and community achievements.

The Program Awards category includes multi-year programming, business retention and expansion, entrepreneurship, neighborhood development, human capital, sustainable and green development, and real estate redevelopment/reuse. The numerous award winners in this category constitute a database that is worth mining for examples of best practice and promising strategy. A few of the notable 2017 winners include: